Sale of the Week - Clark Street Row House

By By Chicago magazine

Published May 29, 2007

List Price: $1.095 millionSale Price: $1.06 million

The Property: One of seven charming brick-and-stone row houses on a busy block of Clark Street, this three-story, four-bedroom home dates to 1888-and is just 18 feet wide. The sellers, Andrew Wolfe and Yoon Hie Jung, gutted and completely rehabbed the interior after buying the place for $520,000 six years ago. They did preserve an original glass skylight above the stairs, the only source of natural light aside from front and rear windows, says their agent, Rubloff North Shore’s Deborah Dwyer. The couple also managed to cram in some modern conveniences, such as the kitchen’s two ovens, two sinks, and a warming drawer. They nodded to the home’s vintage with wide-plank quarter-sawn oak flooring-and subway tile in the kitchen.

The slender home “is like the amazing trick house that gets bigger and bigger when you get inside,” Dwyer says. “The rooms are all large, and the ceilings get higher as you go up to a higher floor.” Because of its thick construction and snug row-house confines, she says, “when you walk in off noisy Clark Street, suddenly you have peace and quiet.” There is no yard, but Lincoln Park is only a block east, and in the rear, the house has the only fenced parking space on this row. It’s a quintessentially urban location-perhaps too crowded for some people-but Dwyer says the buyers (whom she would not name) aren’t likely to be bothered: they’re from New York.

Price Point: Here is a house that demonstrates how essential right-pricing is these days. When the sellers got word last year that they would be transferring to another city, says Dwyer, they initially priced the house at $1.299 million. They dropped it to $1.199 million, but still nothing happened; they took it off the market in fall 2006. When they left town this past April, says Dwyer, they put it back on the market with an asking price of $1.095 million, and by the first weekend, there were six competing offers, with a final sale price of $1.060 million. The deal closed May 22nd.